Wednesday, June 21, 2017

No TSA Screenings For Zombies, or Thoughts on Quarantine 2: Terminal

How,
you may ask, can we skip ahead to a review of Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011),
without mentioning the Quarantine (2008) with Jennifer Carpenter, Deb from
Dexter (I never watched the last season) or the Spanish REC (2007) series
they’re based on?All I can tell
you is I pretty much just write about whatever movie I watched the night
before, and I like to link the posts together to previous references.

From
director John Pogue, who would go on to make The Quiet Ones (2014), the sequel takes place during the same night as the first movie and
charts the zombie rage virus as it escapes Los Angeles on a plane.The movie diverges from the events of
the REC series in an entirely new direction (which ultimately goes nowhere as
the franchise was abandoned) and no longer found footage, but it is still filmed
in that shaky POV style, where the camera follows the characters and forces the
audience into becoming an unwilling and helpless participant.

The
virus, passed by animal bites, gets on a red-eye flight filled with your
typical cross-section of heroes and potential zombies; the honeymoon couple,
the first child pregnant couple, the Alzheimer senior couple, the black yuppie,
the drunk fat guy, the army medic home on leave to see her fiancé that she
hasn’t seen in a year, and the sullen broken-home teen flying by himself.It’s a relatively anonymous cast,
though it did include Mercedes Mason, currently portraying Ofelia in Fear the
Walking Dead as Jenny, one of the flight attendants.

Only
the first third of the film is on a plane, there’s one outbreak and then the
plane lands in a seemingly abandoned terminal like they’re in The Langoliers
(1995), only the airport’s been quarantined and evacuated.The government has no cure, and the
rest of the film, like the first movie, has the cast fighting each other and
the soldiers guarding all the exits as they try to escape before the inevitable
zombification.It puts the
audience in an odd moral place; we’re essentially rooting for a zombie
apocalypse because we want these guys to escape.The soldiers on the outside are protecting us, the audience,
but in this movie they’re the baddies.There’s a certain sense of futility in most zombie movies and TV shows
these days, reflecting the current political climate, so from that perspective
Quarantine 2: Terminal (2011) was ahead of its time.